


The Least a 100-Year-Old Murder God Could Do

by wysiwygot



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Fighting Kink, POV Female Character, Red Room (Marvel), The Winter Soldier/Black Widow - Freeform, my emotional support winter soldier, soldat kulak widow spy, winter widow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:13:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29549136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wysiwygot/pseuds/wysiwygot
Summary: Natasha's self-discipline doesn't want her to remember training with the Winter Soldier in Belarus, but her body does it anyway.Set somewhere during Captain America: Civil War, after Zemo set the WS free but before the battle in Siberia and Bucky losing his arm YET AGAIN.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	The Least a 100-Year-Old Murder God Could Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheAstronomer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/gifts).



> @theastronomer requested Bucky/Nat Red Room olden times for her birthday and I happily obliged with this hot, convoluted mess. This is baby's very first MCU attempt, so please don't heckle me to death.

Natasha Romanoff would never admit to anyone, not even under pain of death—something she could say with some authority—that it really fucking bothered her when the Winter Soldier didn’t recognize her in close combat. 

Fine, yeah. Zemo had just, _just_ reactivated him. Admittedly, the man was in the middle of a panic-fueled murder rampage, trying to escape from the detention center, but … really? _Really?_ Nothing at all? The guy had looked her straight in the face, directly into her eyes, while her legs were hooked over his thick shoulders, and his metal hand was tightening around her throat—and NOTHING? 

Not even the tiniest flicker of recognition or acknowledgment that it wasn’t the first time they’d been entangled in that exact position? 

It had been a decade and change, fine, but it was a very memorable position! What a blow to the ego.

It sort of made sense that he didn’t know her when he shot her in Odessa. It also figured that the legendary Зимний солдат didn’t know her when she, Steve Rogers, and Sam Wilson first saw him in DC. He had been freshly out from cryo and finally off the leash, just after the whole Fury thing. 

How could he have recognized her, anyway? If Nat hadn’t already had all the intel on a maniac supersoldier with a metal arm, she probably wouldn’t have guessed it was him, either. To be fair, it was out of character from what she knew of the Kulak, the Fist of Hydra. What kind of sneaky assassin was he, anyway? Had she missed the Red Room class on assassins being handed weapons by a support team and launching grenades in the harsh light of day? The Winter Soldier was swaggering around like someone who wanted to be noticed. His metal arm was _glinting in the sun_ , for chrissake, and his long dark hair was kind of wafting in the blowback from the many explosions he caused. Ugh. So dramatic. So unsubtle. So unlike what she knew from hunting this legendary assassin, someone who was only seen when he wanted to be seen.

Why did it make her knees want to buckle?

When she first met the Winter Soldier, the Kulak, he was never, ever in the sun. It was Belarus—neither of them got a lot of beach time. They were both ghosts and orphans, surrounded by other ghosts and orphans. But that was many years ago. She’d blocked out as much of it as she could, but some of it was still lodged in her, like a pit in a ripe peach.

Nat’s hotel TV was, as ever, on for audio cover, just in the off-chance she was bugged. She flipped it to a digital radio station and flopped down in her suite’s dining chair.

Fair enough, then: The Winter Soldier didn’t really have time to remember old comrades while he was stalking around DC, visibly—almost comically—strapped with weapons, with his spooky mask on. Even when Natasha was clinging to his back, trying to garrote him, he basically disregarded her as a momentary bother. 

She’d also spent a good part of that fight running away from him because she wasn’t an idiot like Steve or Sam. She knew what this guy was really capable of, so she ran. If they were smart, they would have run, too. At the very least to get him away from civilians.

So, what was a 100-year-old murder god who she’d had sex with a handful of times but hadn’t seen since Odessa supposed to do—notice she’d changed her hair? At a sprint? From behind? 

Was her ass really that forgettable?

_Stop it. This is stupid. Embarrassing. Vain. Get it together._

OK but hold up: It just didn’t make sense. He shot her in the back while she was running away _and she lived_. It just wasn’t his style. It went against the Russian-Soviet training tenets of every conceivable program. It had taken years of diligent and focused rehabilitation to undo her own scorched earth policies and that was with the help of her Avengers family and a lot of support. 

But, what was _his_ excuse for letting her live? A nonlethal hit to the shoulder was either a mistake or a strategy, with an operative like him. He could have just as easily landed the slug in the back of her skull, and she knew this. He was capable of doing it. She’d seen it happen! More than once! He straight-up murdered a junior trainer who’d thrown sand in his eyes while they were sparring in front of a group of other trainers— _and_ her entire Widows unit—when she was still a teen, and nobody did shit. 

If the Kulak wanted you to be dead, you’d be dead.

But, also: Odessa. He’d spared her there, too! That’s how she came to see it, at least in hindsight: mercy, a kindness, a gift. What else would you call it when an expert marksman with highly specialized knowledge of not just human anatomy but also her specific anatomy shot the person behind her _without_ _killing_ _her_? Why not a double kill shot, for one, and two, why hadn’t he put a second bullet in her face after neutralizing the target, if it wasn’t because he was sparing her for some reason? It could be that he was too mission-focused to clean up after himself, sure. But it simply wasn’t like him to leave witnesses. She knew that because it wasn’t like _her_ to leave witnesses until she started working with Fury. 

Nat watched a fat bead of condensation roll down the straight side of her glass of ice water. God. Talk about a blast from the past. She’d kept it together in public by compartmentalizing. Steve needed that from her. He was in pain and it was fresh. Even if the Winter Soldier _had_ been her first everything, he’d been her nobody/nothing for the years since she’d defected. 

She’d fought him dozens of times in training, fucked him recreationally for a week, dreamed of him hundreds of times since then, and stifled thoughts of him thousands of times over the years. She was built to forget, too—just like he was—but him, she remembered. 

Not even a flicker in his baby blues, though! Not even when he had a good look at her while she was on her back on a table after Zemo said his passphrase and set him off on a rampage. 

Who knows, maybe Barnes was distracted in the canteen fight by Nat kneeing him in the chest at a flat run. Or maybe she’d thrown him off when she dropped down to throw and land a tooth-rattling jab to his groin. Low blows were not beneath either of them, historically. No matter how many serums Hydra administered to him, no matter how many times he’d been bricked and resurrected, torn apart and rebuilt, his cock and balls were always, always, always going to be vulnerable. That’s why a groin attack is a classic. She tested and honed that particular close-combat move on him while training as a teen in Belarus. 

To be fair, he didn’t like it much when she did that back then, either. 

Whatever. He recovered quickly. Before she even had time to reset the combinations of moves she’d just learned, he would be back on his game, his face expressionless and cold. What a dreamboat.

Nat had soon after found out that he gave as good as he got. 

In fact, there was one time he caught her off-guard while sparring and embarrassed her in front of everyone. She’d staggered him back with a roundhouse kick followed by a groin strike, but before she could even get her footing back, the Kulak rushed her, tackled her, and pinned her to the mat. She fully expected another trainer to halt the exercise, so she obediently froze in position. What an amateur. That was clearly the wrong move. With his lips curled back to expose his teeth and his metal arm pressing hard against her neck, she immediately realized she was caught in his trap. In a quick, brutal movement, he kneed her legs further apart, a challenge in his eyes, his jaw set. 

Had they not been wearing clothing, he could have taken her like that, in front of everyone. He was hard, she was wet, they were both worked up. She would have died of humiliation, but it probably would have been worth it. 

He punctuated his triumph with a quick hip thrust against her crotch, just to prove that he could. She’d lost. She hadn’t bested him, clearly, if he was still, uh, functional—rigid, actually—even after being punted in the nuts. He had her and she knew it. But if he took liberties, they’d surely find a way to punish him, too. Something way worse than a kick in the nads. 

Just before he released her and hopped to a crouch over her body, she saw his eyes go dark and flicker momentarily toward her mouth. As she gaped back at him, she spotted the smallest glimpse of the man he must’ve been once, and it was all cocky, smirking cruelty. 

That, obviously, was the first night he came to her under cover of darkness, with special dispensation from her unit leader that she was to undergo extra-special special after-hours training now that she was practically a Widow. But, honestly, if she pulled at _that_ particular thread in her mind, it was all over. If she thought about their time together, shivering in the dark, her learning other reasons that someone might want to be close to someone else’s body, she was going to have a real hard time looking Steve Rogers or any of the Avengers in the face ever again. 

Sex was an integral part of their training. For all of them in the program, it was a cornerstone to being a true Black Widow. If it hadn’t been, maybe they’d been called something else. The Brown Recluse just didn’t have the same panache. Anyway, sex, as a concept, as a rule, wasn’t personal and it definitely wasn’t supposed to be sexy; it was just another great way to use their bodies on a mission. She was, like every other person in her program of origin, trained to fuck for strategy, for proximity, to ingratiate herself with a mark. Close combat really didn’t get any closer than killing a man who was inside of you when you did it. 

Guess she left that part out when she and Steve were chatting about who they really were, and why it was hard to date when you couldn’t really find anyone with shared life experience. She’d nodded when he said that, feeling genuine empathy for him, even as she thought, _If only you knew, Steven. If only you knew how different my shared life experience with the Winter Soldier was from yours._

Whew, was it hot in the penthouse suite, or …? If Nat didn’t know better, she’d think someone had tampered with the thermostat. Perhaps she could enjoy a cold shower. Or maybe something stronger than a glass of water.

With a deep exhalation meant to diffuse the growing tension in her body, Nat took time to marvel over the file’s one photo of James Barnes before his acquisition as an asset and prototype, so many decades before she’d met him in the training center. What a baby-faced idiot. Look at him: Immortalized in the grainy black and sepia tones of the second World War. Just like in the memorial at Captain America’s exhibit at the Smithsonian. James had a great jawline, charmingly set off by a slightly soft chin, piercing eyes, a broad forehead, and a distinctive heavy brow. He looked very little like the stony-faced wall of muscle and flurry of knives she’d known when she was younger, but he was still pretty cute. Nat sighed again. In WWII America, he probably looked like every other cocky, fresh-faced youngun with a death wish, but decades later, when Nat met him in Belarus—god, he was stunning. An easy 8. Maybe a 9 when he took his clothes off. Something about that metal arm just did it for all the girls.

Oh quit it. What _was_ this? She’d already spent way too much time poring over the original documents before she’d made copies for herself and given the stamp and ink version of the file to Steve. Why again, now? She knew the legend by heart: the heroic American soldier, captured on the front lines, and administered his first round of chems by Herr Zola himself. He was still Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes then, with two flesh-and-bone arms. Steve Rogers (cue applause, fireworks) himself swooped in and rescued his best friend, which was … sweet. It was sweet. A nice, wholesome legend for history to honor. 

That must have been such a great time for Rogers, really. Fighting side-by-side with his buddy, out in the open. Reconnecting with his past, dreaming of the future in his hot new bod. That lucky son of a bitch and his charmed life, good lord. Nat choked back a smile, thinking of America’s fiercest golden retriever. 

But then, again, Steve had gone and lost him a second time. You know how it is: Some friends grow apart, fall out of touch, or move on to new chapters ... while other friends get blasted by an experimental Hydra cannon and fall to their probable deaths from a fast-moving train in Eastern Europe.

“Sorry, Steve. That wasn’t fair of me,” she whispered to the photo of young Bucky Barnes, Steve’s first and best friend. He’d lost something that she’d never had, and he’d lost him over and over and over again.

 _Shut up, Nat. No one needs to know that you feel bad for Captain America_. But, instead of knocking off talking to herself like she should have, she turned up the TV.

Nat flipped through the heavily redacted pages that followed: Winter Soldier prototype/asset reattained following a great fall, body intact minus the better part of one arm, blah blah blah, reconditioned, retrained, broken down and rebuilt, only the blackest of black ops, trotted out for the big missions, high-profile hits, otherwise used as an occasional Leviathan and later a Red Room trainer, yadda yadda, the assassin of assassins, with the tightest secrecy, the highest-ranking handlers, so dangerous he had to be put into cryogenic stasis between jobs. Fucking Hydra. What a bunch of assholes.

Admittedly, Natasha loved a good ghost story—she basically trafficked in them, hid out in them. But this one was a little too close to where her heart should’ve been. Beyond even her personal involvement, the best-kept secret in the assassin world was now public knowledge and it made her feel jumpy. Hell, even Steve knew most of it now, even if he was too distracted by his own pain to notice Nat’s careful distance from Barnes. It didn’t occur to him that anyone else might have an interest in him beyond an extremely unsubtle attack on Nick Fury and his personal hand in bringing down a couple billion dollars’ worth of defense technology.

Steve would never know—could never know—just how intimately Natasha knew the Winter Soldier. She could spare him that, as a friend. Clearly, he was in enough pain as it was. 

The photo of the Soldier in cryo stasis, though. That was the face she knew. Even slack and unconscious, it was sharper, harder than the WWII kid. He was a grown-ass man when she met him—a freshly thawed, battle-tested _soldat_. All the girls all were a-tizzy about his looks, obviously. They might have been super assassins in training, but they were also teenagers, so they discussed his cheekbones at length in hushed whispers after the lights went out. The shape of him, so strong, so different from the limber litheness of their ballet instructors. The size of him, those shoulders. His long dark hair, falling into his eyes. The weight and heft of his metal arm, the mystery of how it worked. And those creases in his forehead. _How old is he?_ , the girls wondered. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, so maybe 25? Maybe 30. Ancient, compared to them, and yet younger than most of the trainers.

Looking at the vintage image, Nat imagined that James Barnes probably had had a really nice smile, back when he actually smiled. Before the war. Maybe even during, when he and Cap were punching Nazis and liberating Europe. 

By the time Nat knew him, though, his mouth was a tight, wide line. A grimace. What would it take to make him smile now? He’d barely spoken, back at the Red Room. Maybe his Russian was bad. Everyone assumed it was either that, or he’d had his vocal cords removed so he couldn’t scream. Theories abounded. Nat was young and dumb enough to make a stupid joke about him being the Fist—har har har—to her classmate, who immediately ratted on her and landed Natalia in literal hot water (no, really, it was scalding and she got second-degree burns on her feet) with her minder. The Soldier was NOT a joke. He was an asset. He sure wasn’t intended to be anything at all to her, aside from an enemy combatant and occasional trainer.

That’s why it was almost laughable, being at close range with him again. Seeing his face hovering above her when he had her pinned on the table. He’d already disabled Tony’s palm thing and he’d high-key crushed a table with Agent 13—Sharon—before Nat was able to fling herself on his shoulders. She spun around his neck and wound up sitting on his chest in the hopes that she could use his bulk against him, to knock him off balance. She meant to fell him like a tree, but instead, he did the thing she was hoping he wouldn’t and gained the upper hand. He slammed her down hard on a tabletop and she almost blacked out. Briefly stunned, with the wind knocked out of her, she looked up at him in absolute dazed wonder, just as he started to choke her. She thought, _Hey, it’s me. It’s me, Nata! Remember me!_

His face, like that, was dimly familiar in its rage and intensity. In a flash of memory almost more painful than her larynx getting partially crushed, she suddenly recalled that that was what he looked like when he was fucking, too. 

Like on that first private night together, when he was still a little angry about getting noticeably erect during their sparring. That first night, they had to break the proverbial ice.

_Don’t go there. Don’t think about that night, when you thought you were going off to kiss like in the stories, but instead he led you to a mat room, kicked your legs out from under you, put you into a submission hold, and then withdrew, motioning for you to do the same to him. Don’t think about how he made you practice the counter move to the one he’d taken you down with in front of the whole class earlier in the day. He was teaching you what to do if a man was trying to knee your legs apart, how to use the motion against him—over and over and over until your thighs and shoulders ached. Definitely don’t think about how you stopped wrestling him and started to grind against him, instead; the friction and static electricity damn near creating sparks. Your mouth on his. All of this was expressly forbidden in nonlethal combat. Naughty, naughty._

Remembering the look on his face in the dim light of the mat room made her whole body shiver. He’d looked like he was remembering something older than a mission briefing. Maybe remembering that he was a man before he was the Kulak, that he knew how and when to let a lady win. By the time he was inside her, and she started to ride him, the sparring had gone from a private lesson to a mutually beneficial situation.

Nat finished her water in one long, slow pull. Goddamn. 

What training forcibly forgets, the body diligently remembers. 

That fight, in the canteen. _That’s_ when he should have known her. His body should have remembered her, even if his brain was too scrambled to do it. Her ass might be forgettable at a distance, through a scope, but this was close range: her thighs were soaking in the heat coming off his body, his breath was in her face, his hair tangled in her hands. How could he not recognize her like this? Had she aged so badly? 

Nat might have even tried to make a better quip about the cyclical nature of their bodies interacting over time—if she hadn’t been pretty sure he was about to kill her. Instead, the thing that slipped out of her mouth was something embarrassingly honest about how annoying it was that he didn’t recognize her.

She realized only now, after days of hindsight, that the only possible indication she had that James knew her was that his metal hand didn’t immediately pulverize her neck down to the spinal cord. So, maybe he _did_ know her, on some cellular-memory level, even if he didn’t know himself in that moment.

No. She was reaching. _This is stupid_ , she thought. He didn’t know her. _Stop being weird. Stop taking it personally._ She wasn’t a ghost to him. She was simply just an enemy in his way. Steve, he remembered. Her? Nothing.

Nat sat back and surveyed the file contents strewn across the frosted glass top of her hotel table. An indistinct but familiar ache was growing between her legs, a tight little coil of want nestled up against her core. Damn it. Stupid biological imperatives. She nevertheless enjoyed the sensation for the space of three breaths—squeezing her legs together and rocking herself slightly forward, indulging her want so quickly yet deeply that she could have made herself come hands-free, probably—before she mentally fought back against her urges and sat back in the chair. If she started, it would only make it worse. 

_Down, girl. He wasn’t who you knew. What’s more, he wasn’t EVER who you thought you knew._

So, why did he still do it for her, all these years later? How embarrassing. Why the fuck did the softly quirked line of his lips in the two shitty archival photos—paired with her recent memory of when he tried to murder her a little bit—make her body go completely haywire in private moments like this? That kind of basic-bitch weakness was entirely counter to her early training and the very foundation of her self-discipline. 

But yes, her body definitely remembered him very well, and with the subtle throb in her undies came a flood of memories into her mind. 

Young Natalia Romanoff was the best in her class. The best, period. The program had systematically broken her of every single attachment and weakness they could think of, save for this. Like the Winter Soldier had done many times before she was even on the planet, she emerged from the program reborn: hardened, remorseless, and ready to comply. By the time the program was completed, he was gone, and whoever she might have been was gone too. She obviously wasn’t supposed to develop a schoolgirl crush on the Winter Soldier, to have that brief affair with him, to pine for him helplessly after. But the pining continued on some level, even after he abruptly disappeared from her life, even after convincing herself he was a ghost. 

In the end, even years later, the Kulak, the Winter Soldier, James “Bucky” Barnes—whatever you wanted to call him—was just another man who was trying to kill her. 

The part that bothered her, though, that kept her up most the night in her hotel room, was that he’d had the chance to kill her more than once and didn’t take it. 


End file.
